When Inland residents descend on National Night Out events to meet law enforcement officers, eat hot dogs, listen to music and inspect police equipment, organizers hope they will see some unfamiliar faces: those of their neighbors.

“You have so many people who stay locked up in their houses,” Hemet police Lt. Eric Dickson said. “It’s good to get out and meet. You get to know what your neighbor looks like, what kind of vehicle they have.”

The annual event promotes relationship-building among residents and police officers, and it encourages neighbor-to-neighbor conversations about crime prevention on their streets. Police organize many of the National Night Out events – most will be taking place Tuesday as the nationwide event is scheduled for the first Tuesday in August – and visit events staged by community members.

Such gatherings, police and community members say, put into focus the need for the public to help the law enforcement agencies by participating in crime prevention themselves. That means getting to know who lives in the neighborhood, whether the car in someone’s driveway belongs there, going to the effort to create a Neighborhood Watch group or simply keeping an eye out for suspicious activity.

“Neighbors looking out for each other is one of the strongest agents of prevention,” Riverside police Lt. Christian Dinco said.

Riverside resident Chani Beeman, chairwoman of the Downtown Area Neighborhood Alliance, is using National Night Out to promote membership in five Neighborhood Watch groups.

“For me, the emphasis is really about connecting with your neighbors and taking responsibility for your neighborhood and then connecting that with police,” said Beeman, a former member of Riverside’s Human Relations Commission and Community Police Review Commission. “I think we run into trouble when we distance ourselves from law enforcement and say, ‘That’s the police officers’ job.’ We have responsibility, and that’s what National Night Out is.”

That responsibility, Beeman added, includes being the “eyes and ears” for police and helping them establish enforcement priorities.

BARBECUE DIPLOMACY

Police promote National Night Out as an opportunity for the public to meet police in a stress-free setting but note the tangible benefits can be difficult to quantify. Hemet, however, has been able to measure the success it has had by partnering with the Green Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the environment.

Together, they stage barbecues in residents’ front yards. The residents talk about crime prevention – turning on their porch lights at night, locking their cars and removing anything valuable from view in the cars – and crime has decreased in those neighborhoods, Dickson said.

“We’ve noticed not only are the people happier, but we’ve had fewer calls for service,” he said.

Police say most people who turn out to meet them at National Night Out events are pro-law enforcement. At a time when the debate about police use of deadly force, particularly against blacks, is intense, police are not expecting protests or negative comments at their gatherings.

Fontana police Sgt. Brian Heaviside said his officers are ready to listen to any comments Tuesday.

“We want to be responsive to the community as a whole, and everybody as a voice,” he said. “If there is something the Police Department can do to better serve the community, then we’ll do it.”

Deborah Wong, co-chairwoman of the Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability, praised National Night Out for fostering people-to-people relationships and forging community and police partnerships.

“With that said,” Wong wrote in an email, “NNO is important but not enough in itself. It’s only one element in what's needed for broad-based police accountability. Police commissions and legislation like AB953 are equally if not even more necessary for oversight of the police. Ferguson (the controversial police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri in 2014) and sustained public attention to the officer-involved deaths of African Americans offer dramatic evidence that structural changes are needed.”

AB953, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015, is intended to reduce concerns about racial profiling. It requires law enforcement agencies to report the time, date and location of traffic stops and the reason for the stops, and it requires the state attorney general to create the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board.

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